Taglines: The Rain is coming… and so is the Family.
Lalit Verma is a father, who is trying to organize an enormous, chaotic, and expensive wedding for his daughter, for whom he has arranged a marriage with a man she has known for only a few weeks. As so often happens in Mira Nair’s beloved Punjabi culture, such a wedding means that, for one of the few times each generation, the whole family comes together from all corners of the globe.
The bride, Aditi Verma, is nervous as she has been having an affair with her married ex-boss Vikram. Ria Verma is a cousin of the bride, was sexually abused by her uncle, Lalit’s brother-in-law and the family’s patriarch some years earlier, and finally speaks out to prevent his abuse of another young girl in the family, Aliyah. The wedding contractor PK Dubey falls in love with the family’s maid, Alice.
The bride’s brother Varun, struggles with his father’s disapproval of his longing to be a chef and angst at his inability to satisfy the stereotypes of conventional Indian masculine characteristics, possibly stemming from a struggle to come to terms with the boy’s homosexuality. Ayesha the youngest marriageable relative of the bride, flirts with Aditi’s cousin Rahul, who has just returned from Melbourne. This is all set within the two days preceding the wedding, predominantly at the Verma’s house.
Monsoon Wedding is a 2001 drama film directed by Mira Nair and written by Sabrina Dhawan, which depicts romantic entanglements during a traditional Punjabi Hindu wedding in Delhi. Writer Sabrina Dhawan wrote the first draft of the screenplay in a week while she was at Columbia University’s MFA film program. Monsoon Wedding earned just above $30 million at the box office. Although it is set entirely in New Delhi, the film was an international co-production between companies in India, the United States, Italy, France, and Germany.
The film won the Golden Lion award and received a Golden Globe Award nomination. A musical based on the film was in development and was premiered on Broadway in April 2014. The film was premiered in the Marché du Film section of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, IndieWire named it the best romance of the 21st century.
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Directed by: Mira Nair
Starring: Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Parvin Dabas, Vasundhara Das, Randeep Hooda, Ram Kapoor, Jas Arora
Screenplay by: Sabrina Dhawan
Production Design by: Stephanie Carroll
Cinematography by: Declan Quinn
Film Editing by: Allyson C. Johnson
Costume Design by: Arjun Bhasin
art Direction by: Sunil Chhabra
Music by: Mychael Danna
MPAA Rating: R for language, including some sex related dialogue.
Distributed by: USA Films
Release Date: November 30, 2001
Visits: 60
